“If he meets Lang, if he fights face to face with Thoreau, or if they call upon us to parley, all is lost!  M’sieur, for the love of God, hold your fire for those two!  We must kill them.  If a parley is granted, they will come to us.  We will kill them—­even as they come toward us with a white flag, if we must!”

“No truce will be granted!” cried Philip.

As if John Adare himself had heard his words, he stopped and faced those behind him.  They were in the shelter of the forest.  In the gray gloom of dawn they were only a sea of shifting shadows.

“Men, there is to be no mercy this day!” he said, and his voice rumbled like an echo through the aisles of the forest.  “We are not on the trail of men, but of beasts and murderers.  The Law that is three hundred miles away has let them live in our midst.  It has let them kill.  It said nothing when they stole Red Fawn from her father’s tepee and ravaged her to death.  It has said:  ’Give us proof that Thoreau killed Reville, and that his wife did not die a natural death.’  We are our own law.  In these forests we are masters.  And yet with this brothel at our doors we are not safe, our wives and daughters are within the reach of monsters.  To-day it is my daughter—­her husband’s wife.  To-morrow it may be yours.  There can be no mercy.  We must kill—­kill and burn!  Am I right, men?”

This time it was not a murmur but a low thunder of voice that answered.  Philip and Jean forged ahead to his side.  Shoulder to shoulder they led the way.

From the camp at the Forks it was eighteen miles to the Devil’s Nest, where hung on the edge of a chasm the log buildings that sheltered Lang and his crew.  To these men of the trails those eighteen miles meant nothing.  White-bearded Janesse’s trapline was sixty miles long, and he covered it in two days, stripping his pelts as he went.  Renault had run sixty miles with his dogs between daybreak and dusk, and “Mad” Joe Horn had come down one hundred and eighty miles from the North in five days.  These were not records.  They were the average.  Those who followed the master of Adare were thin-legged, small-footed, narrow-waisted—­but their sinews were like rawhide, and their lungs filled chests that were deep and wide.

With the break of day the wind fell, the sky cleared, and it grew colder.  In silence John Adare, Jean, and Philip broke the trail.  In silence followed close behind them the Missioner with his smooth-bore.  In silence followed the French and half-breeds and Crees.  Now and then came the sharp clink of steel as rifle barrel struck rifle barrel.  Voices were low, monosyllabic; breaths were deep, the throbbing of hearts like that of engines.  Here were friends who were meeting for the first time in months, yet they spoke no word of each other, of the fortunes of the “line,” of wives or children.  There was but one thought in their brains, pumping the blood through their veins, setting their dark faces in lines of iron, filling their eyes with the feverish fires of excitement.  Yet this excitement, the tremendous passion that was working in them, found no vent in wild outcry.